Episode 29 | Part One: Change the World

Gregory Shepard, an entrepreneur who's built and sold 12 businesses, a recipient of 4 private equity awards, TEDx speaker, and Forbes author. This is The Boss Podcast with Gregory Shepard.

I must say, folks, I had a chance to talk to this guy a little bit before the podcast, and I was just so excited to have him On the podcast. He is the CEO, special forces guy, amazing guy. My guest this week is Magnus Grimeland, the founder of Antler. Antler is a global early-stage VC and investing company enabling thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide to realize their dreams and change the world, similar to what I'm trying to do with this podcast. Magnus, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Very excited to be here.

Oh, man, it's just really great to have you. I mean, you know, I think of you as an icon in our space and your background as I looked into you was just really— I mean, it's really impressive. I'm excited for the entrepreneurs and investors, you know, listening to this to listen to you talk about some of these things that you've done and some of your experience. It's just dynamic stuff. Magnus, your goal is to help aspiring leaders to build businesses that can positively impact economies. How did you start down this path? And the second part of that question is, when did you realize that it wasn't just about making money? And I want to just say this real quick because I was really impressed with this. You know, you served in the Royal Norwegian Navy in special operations, so basically the Navy SEALs of Norway. And you served as captain on the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. and received several certifications in mountain rescue. It goes on and on, folks. He worked with developing projects in Zimbabwe targeting clean water, electricity, and basic healthcare and training for sustainable businesses. I mean, I don't even know where to start. Let's start with how you started down this path.

Yeah, so I mean, that's— it's a big question, but basically quite early on in life, my great-grandmother died and I started thinking a lot about the meaning of being on Earth, and I thought at least we should do something to ensure that being around made the world a little bit better. And in the early days of my life, I took every opportunity to do that. So the Royal National Lifeboat Institution was in the UK, and we had a rescue boat which would go out if, you know, a ship capsized or somebody fell off a cliff, or basically anything related to kind of maritime rescue. And then Norwegian Navy SEALs, obviously similar. But, you know, during that period of time, actually, one of my teachers— I went to United World College in the UK— one of my teachers there was, was a former SAS operator, you know, the Special Air Service in the UK. And I remember talking to him over Christmas one time when I was in the Norwegian Naval Special Forces, and, and we had this conversation about having impact on the micro level versus having an impact on a macro level. I think both of them are incredibly important, right? So, if you're a surgeon, you will save a life there and then. If you're one person in the military, especially in the special forces, you do kind of micro operations. So, you have like a specific impact there and then. Now, that micro impact might have a bigger impact being leveraged, right? Like, you know, you never really know. how a micro action will affect the wider world. But one of the things that we spoke a lot about is like, how can you have, you know, more impact on a bigger scale? And that's what kind of brought me out of the military and to Harvard and then later McKinsey. And then we built obviously selora.com, which is the biggest fashion e-commerce company in Southeast Asia. And now obviously with Antler, trying to enable thousands of incredible leaders all across the globe to solve important problems and build great businesses around it. So, it's kind of a move from from micro impact to macro impact, I think both of them are insanely important.

I agree. I agree. One of the things that you, you say that many of the people that you met while studying at Harvard play an essential role in your life. I wondered if you could talk to me about that and how these people have played a role and in what way in impacting you. And then I wonder also along the lines of what you just described, if there's other folks that you've met that also impact what you're doing now?

Yes, so I think this has always been something which has been very important to me and I think should be important to everyone is if you try to seek out environments, it could really be anywhere where you meet other exceptional people, you enter into conversations and inspirational conversations that, that will affect the path you take going forward. And obviously at the Harvard days, you were kind of lucky to meet so many different people from so many different countries and so many different backgrounds. But it was the same when I was, you know, in high school. Um, I was lucky to, to apply to this scholarship, and we were people from 82 nations who lived together in, um, in the boarding school in the UK. In the military, right? Different type of exceptional people who You know, it was about 1,000 people who started, and, you know, we were 8 or 10 people each year kind of get through. And, you know, the people you're with there, you get very close to. When you're in those environments, try to find people who are doing something exceptional in their small or big way will influence the world. And obviously we were at Harvard in the days— I was there 2003 to 2007, and it was the kind of second wave of tech growth. After the dot-com, a lot of people ended up going into tech and building new businesses. So for example, we have Josh Kushner who built Thrive Capital out of the UK. We have, you know, the Winklevoss twins who, you know, was part of building up, you know, it's murky, the kind of social network early days, but obviously they were onto that idea, later on to the cryptocurrency idea and You know, they were quite leading in the NFT space in the early days. Will Gaybrick, who was part of building up Stripe. Sam Teller, who was Elon Musk's chief of staff for a very long period of time. Mark Zuckerberg, obviously, who built Facebook. Bib Moore, who's one of our partners here, who was Zuckerberg's roommate in college, actually, who, you know, went on after college, instead of being part of building up Facebook, he ended up doing a master's in Dutch Indonesian history and ended up building one of the biggest e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia called Lazada, which was sold to Alibaba for $3.5 billion. So, like, people from all types of walks of life doing really interesting things that you were very lucky to spend time with in the early years of your life. So, I feel very grateful to have been able to spend time with these types of people.

It's clear that you associate yourself with exceptional people like yourself. And in early days, the rumor is that you had a chance to join Facebook in the beginning. And as a partner at McKinsey, how did this sequence happen? Was it Facebook and McKinsey, McKinsey then Facebook? How did this unroll? Because these 2 things are pretty big deals.

A lot of people had the option to join Facebook in the early days as an intern. And I think a lot of people who ended up joining as an intern ended up doing incredibly well because this was obviously at the time where there was just, you know, a few thousand people on the platform and people were paid in equity. And I chose to join McKinsey and obviously Facebook was started in 2004. I left Harvard in 2007. So these were a few years apart. You know, I come from the countryside in Norway, grew up on a small farm there. Both of my parents are nurses. So my mother She works with refugees and helps, so all the refugees who are coming to our county in Norway, you know, to get the right vaccines, get integrated into society, start learning Norwegian, get into school, all that stuff, that's what she worked with. And my father's a psychiatric nurse, so he works at, used to work at the suicide ward in the county. So I came from a background where, you know, it's a humble background, but obviously in a very well-off country, Norway. And after, you know, 4 years in college and student debt and so on, at the time I felt like I need to go into a job where I could pay that back and, you know, get started on solid financial footing, knowing that at some point in the future we'd build something. So I wanted to pick something where I'd learn as much as I possibly could around business, and I think McKinsey there is is a great place to start because you get to work with, you know, if you pick the right space and you pick the right office, you get to work with incredible CEOs in a lot of different companies at the early time in your careers. You just learn a ton. So I joined McKinsey, started working with tech companies all across the globe. So I spent about one-third of my time in Asia, one-third of my time in Europe, one-third of my time in the US just working with tech companies, the whole value chain from semiconductor companies to consumer electronics companies to media, telco companies, and loved it and learned so much every day. And, you know, took that network and those learnings into building my first business. Now, yes, it did delay me launching my first kind of big business myself, but, you know, ended up then launching that from, I think, a more solid footing.

Let's talk about that a little bit. You know, you are a real entrepreneur. I mean, the story is fantastic. I also come from a really humble background. You know, my family didn't have any money and, you know, we worked our way up from nothing. And I have really mad respect for that. And a lot of entrepreneurs are doing the same thing. And, you know, they want to hear from folks like you that are out there doing this on their own. You know, I wonder if you could kind of give us a little review of what the company was and, and, uh, just kind of take it from one to done, uh, real quickly. I think that, you know, your story is, is unique, um, because of the path that you took. Do you— would you mind talking about that a little bit?

I think there are, there are many ways, um, towards what, what one wants to kind of achieve in life, but one of the things that— the way I've been driven very much Is you want to ensure that over time what you're passionate about doing and what you're excited about spending your time on gets closer and closer to what you're actually spending your time on. And there's probably a phase in life which is more preparatory, right? If you— let's say you want to— if you want to be like— if you want to be a heart surgeon, you can't just go out there and start operating hearts. You need to kind of prepare on that journey, right? And that's been a bit my thing is that, you know, when I was at Harvard, I loved it, it was amazing because I learned a lot, met a lot of great people, but academia wasn't my life. When I went to the military, you know, I loved that as well, but that wasn't my life. When I went to McKinsey, I loved that as well, learned a ton. And as I kind of moved forward, I got closer and closer to what I was passionate around. You know, there's been kind of 2 steps after McKinsey. One of them, we launched this fashion e-commerce company called Zalora.com. And the background of that is we saw this amazing growth of e-commerce all across the globe, and in Southeast Asia, this particular vertical was still quite nascent. So, for example, if you wanted to buy a specific brand in Indonesia, an international brand, you'd have to buy that off a US site or a European site or a Japanese site, and you never know if the product would arrive, how much you'd have to pay in customs, whether it would arrive at all. It was a terrible customer experience, completely opposite of what you now expect from Amazon, where you click something and you get it whenever you're supposed to get it. So, we saw it as a huge opportunity, right? So, we just launched the biggest fashion e-commerce platform across Southeast Asia, and that was an interesting experience because when you build an e-commerce company in the more developed part of the world, you can tap into existing logistics networks, you can tap into payment systems. We couldn't really tap into any of that, so we had to build our own logistics network, we had to build server parks, we built roads and warehouses. It was, you know, pretty gritty job. We would clear ghosts out of warehouses in Indonesia. And, you know, we, at the beginning, we couldn't take— only there was 3% bank card penetration in Indonesia, so only 3% of customers could pay with a card. So, the only way to check out is you'd need— you'd have to go on the site, get a code, go to your bank, pay in cash, get that code, go back to your computer and, you know, finish the checkout. It was obviously a terrible way to buy stuff, so we launched cash on delivery across Southeast Asia, so it's 450 million people.

Wow.

Hundreds of thousands of islands. And we had, you know, when we launched this cash delivery system, we had 109 days worth of working capital out somewhere in Southeast Asia, money that people had paid for stuff that was making its way from like one island back to an airport, to another airport, on the road, back to a warehouse so that we could get the money for the clothes that we sold. So, it was a super exciting journey where You know, we were solving all these really hard operational problems while building a tech company. And that became the inspiration of Antler, really. Since we hired, you know, so many great people who became the logistics experts in Southeast Asia, the tech experts in Southeast Asia, the performance market experts in Southeast Asia, and so on, they would go on to build the next generation great companies here in the region, like Gojek, who just IPO'd as GoTo, $25 billion valuation. You know, the founders of that used to work in Zalora, like Shopee, who's part of Sea Group, which is now a $45 billion business, peaked at $200 billion during the pandemic. And these people, you know, really learned their task and their trade in the Zalora days and went on to build all these new great businesses. And that's what we're now doing with Antler, basically, is enabling these people. So, you know, it's a long way to answer your question, but throughout that journey, you know, I got closer and closer where You wake up every morning, spend your time on what you're very passionate about, and, you know, the fashion business was great. It was one of the biggest exits in Southeast Asia when we sold it. However, you know, I didn't want to spend the rest of my life making people better dressed. Now, finally, we launched Antler when I was 38. So, I guess at 38, suddenly I wake up every day spending 100% of my time doing what I'm very passionate about, which is enabling great people all across the globe. to kind of solve important problems and build great businesses around it.

That's just the greatest story. I just think that's fantastic. It's just such a great story. Now, you grew up in Norway, and I'm just always curious about entrepreneurship and founders in the general ecosystem and how it varies from place to place. But even though you grew up in Norway, you're still very savvy on Western Europe, North America, and obviously where you are out there in Asia. I'm wondering what the differences are. I mean, you described some of the differences in the early days of commerce. What are the differences from these different regions with regards to accelerators and early-stage startups and how that whole ecosystem works?

The US very much obviously has been pioneering this whole industry, you know, in many respects over a very long period of time, has kind of attracted some of the world's best talent to come to the US and build alongside the best US talent and, you know, being able to take that risk and if you fail, you start again. The rest of the world has followed a bit slower and I actually do think that Asia, you know, came kind of second there. So, you had obviously a lot of innovation in Europe for thousands of years. that when it comes to kind of the later stages of innovation, the US has very much been in the forefront. After that, you know, you saw a lot of great things happening in China. You've seen a lot of things, you know, happening in other places across the globe. But Europe really only recently have seen the ecosystems grow really large and more and more people pursuing entrepreneurship. So now I think we live in a world where Entrepreneurship has become more distributed. So if you go a decade back in time, there was only 37 cities in the world that had supported a unicorn, so meaning a company that started up that hit more than a billion-dollar valuation. If you look at it today, there's almost 150 cities across the globe. Wow. That helped build the unicorn. And part of that is that you can access these great competency centers all across the globe from any location. Globalization, we've been talking about it for hundreds of years, but it's really only now that the world is truly global, right? It took the airline industry 68 years to get 50 million customers. It took the TV industry almost 50 years. I think it took the radio industry 38 years to get 50 million customers. Think about that. So, it's like almost half a decade to get to 50 million customers. It took Pokémon Go 14 days. It took Twitter 1 year. So, you can launch these businesses now really anywhere in the world where you can serve, you know, billions of people or hundreds of thousands of small businesses or thousands of big businesses really from anywhere. And that has never existed before. So, you see these amazing SaaS platforms coming out of places like Sydney. You have challengers to Google and Apple coming out of places like Stockholm through Spotify and Atlassian in Sydney. So, like, great businesses can now be built anywhere. Now, if you combine that with the situation we're in now where you have dozens of technologies maturing at the same time, whether it's biotechnology, genome technology, or blockchain or AI or IoT. You have all these technologies maturing at the same time, meaning that they're coming out of labs and they're coming out of science fiction books and they're actually being used to solve real problems. And you combine that with the prices of building a business going down through the cloud, through rapid prototyping, through rent-a-lab technology. You can now build deep tech companies, B2B companies, B2C companies much cheaper than you did before. So, you have globalization, technologies maturing, you have all these technologies, you have the cost of building businesses going down. That has led to this world where you can really build great companies out of anywhere. So, in the US, what's happening there is companies are being started in more US cities. In Europe, it means that Europe is getting this revival in terms of innovation. In Asia, with a growing population, growing middle class, and the fastest digitalization ever, you know, 2.5 billion people going digital in a short period of time, this has led to this tremendous kind of revolution in innovation. So yes, the last 2 years have been kind of quite stimulus-fueled, and also the tech space benefited a lot from that, and there's going to be a contraction right now. But the fundamental growth drivers and the ability for great entrepreneurs to really influence the world is just bigger, and it's ever been. And that has led to this tremendous disruption. If you go 56 years back in time and you look at the world's 500 largest companies, they were all half a century old on average. So if you became one of the world's largest businesses, you would remain so for half a century. Now that's down to 12 years. And we think about these big companies today, they're all going to be disrupted in the future. And for the first time ever, you don't know if that's going to be from the Valley or from New York or from Austin or from Boulder or from London or from Sydney or from Singapore, right? So it's very, very exciting times.

Yeah, I agree. It's crazy. You never know where deals are coming from these days. Sometimes they're coming out of tiny towns in Arkansas. It's really interesting. Well, hang on, Magnus. We have to take a break, but coming up in the second part of my discussion with Magnus Gremlund, The founder of Antler, Magnus shares some advice on what every startup entrepreneur should do first.

The number one thing is you need to build a kick-ass co-founder team. A great operator, you need to— you probably benefit from a great technical co-founder. If you're a great technical co-founder, it's great to get a great operator on board. Learn more about the BOSS Business Operating Support System at bossstartupscience.com. Or you can reach Gregory Shepard at GregoryShepard.com. This has been a production of Forbes Books.