Building a Mission-Driven Company from Sweden: Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your hottest selling product?

Anders Ankarlid: Every new product that we are launching goes up as the new blockbuster. We have an assortment of stone paper notebooks. It’s a replacement for pulp-based stationery products. You take leftovers from the construction industry. You cross the stones. You make it into pellets and then you press it into paper.

Building a Mission-Driven Company from Sweden: Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What was the next step? How did you get to this company?

Anders Ankarlid: I always had this sense that I will some day come back to e-commerce and bring all of the experience I have gained. Then in the summer of 2018, it was extremely hot in Europe.

Building a Mission-Driven Company from Sweden: Anders Ankarlid, CEO of A Good Company (Part 1)

Anders is passionate about climate change. His fifth venture is one that explores his passion for sustainability.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You have done this strategy in a textbook case study way. How many verticals and how many use cases have you gone after? What was the sequence of how you layered these different use cases along each of those use cases?

Lior Gal: There is some strategy and tactical work. For us, the end goal was to build the product that scales to any scale. One day, it will be a service offering on all platforms.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back one step. Winning big customers like PayPal, what was the pitch that you made to let you start working on their technology stack?

Lior Gal: It’s the same pitch, but the pitch isn’t the trick if you can call it a trick. The process is, you need to identify which customers are early adopters. You can google PayPal and see if they have any PRs with any companies.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet Yaniv?

Lior Gal: Through one of the angel investors. He was a Chairman at one of the startups that I worked for and knew the three other technical co-founders from another company. When he met them, he reached out to me and introduced me. He did not set up expectations.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was going to be in the product that you were putting together based on this general observation?

Lior Gal: The first building block is, it needs to be software. That might sound not that unique but in this space, people are still buying appliances. It needs to be software because that’s the way the future consumption is going to be.

Bridging Complex Technology To Market: Lior Gal, CEO of Excelero (Part 1)

This is a textbook case study of how to bring complex technology to market.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Lior Gal: I’m an Israeli out of Tel Aviv and soon to be 47 years old. I grew up in Israel. I did army service for five years and then left the army to study computer science and math in university. I ended up working in the space.