At the end of June I quit my job to become a founder. No concrete idea, no revenue, no traction. All I had was the absolute conviction I was making the right decision, plus a great business partner in Jacob Heden Malm!

The two of us have spent the lion’s share of the summer in Stockholm working on various ideas, launching products, meeting founders and mapping out our future. Urgency is a word that’s often on the lips of those in the startup space. Everything is about high velocity, making quick decisions, failing fast. Those are great soundbites and a useful mentality in many environments, however sometimes you just need to take some time to really fucking think about things. No pressure, no deadlines, just thoughts. Before starting this journey I spoke to a successful founder I know — he runs a tech company in London with 200 employees. I asked him for some advice about my first steps as a founder. “Enjoy the summer” was his wry reply. Now, whilst I didn’t spend the last two months sipping mai tais through an umbrella straw, I made sure I enjoyed myself.

One discussion my cofounder and I have indulged in over the summer is choosing where to found our new enterprise. Armed with European passports and no real sense of loyalty to anywhere, this has been a much more difficult decision than I initially thought. Paul Graham’s 2008 essay “Cities and Ambition” came to mind whilst I compared the pros and cons of the various cities on our shortlist. Truthfully, the first time I read Graham’s essay I dismissed it as an utterly lame and cliché-filled analysis. He makes the unique and clever assessment that in Paris people like to be “stylish” and in London they want to be “aristocratic.” It gave the impression of a tourist who had watched Mary Poppins and eaten a croissant in front of the Eiffel Tower, suddenly feeling qualified to judge the ambitions of tens of millions of people. Yet look past the stereotyping and Graham manages to describe a real phenomenon we have all felt: the city you choose to live and work in matters. Its ambition is palpable. And Stockholm has that in spades.

There’s certainly a buzz in Stockholm that wasn’t present when I lived here a few years ago. A tight-knit community of founders and startups has emerged, and the city of less than two million is competing with much larger players. Dealroom ranked Stockholm as the third best startup hub in Europe, after Paris and London. So far in 2025 Sweden has produced more unicorns than any other EU country, and more than France and Germany put together.

One thing that struck me is how “un-Swedish” this new generation of startup feels. If you’ve spent any time in Stockholm during the summer you’ll be aware of the notorious summer shutdown that occurs. The words sommarstängt (closed for the summer) and på semester (on holiday) are plastered across shopfronts and auto-reply emails. Swedes are normally entitled to four weeks of continuous holiday from June to August, which they take. There’s a general understanding that during the summer if you want to get something done - whether its sales or hiring - you’re better off just waiting until September.

This relaxed approach is definitely not present in the new crop of founders. Slowing down for the summer is off the table and their approach to work seems much more akin to our friends across the pond than the traditional Swedish style. 60 or 70 hour work weeks. Lunch and dinner in the office. Often working weekends. Remote work is the exception. Dropping into to each others office for a face to face chat is the norm.

After all, if you’re building an AI startup, your competition in San Francisco, London or Beijing definitely aren’t taking the summer off.

It’ll be interesting to see where this generational divide takes the city’s tech scene in the next few years, and whether the old school approach will seep into the younger companies as they become more mature.

One rule remains even at hip startups like Lovable, take your shoes off when you enter the office!

Shoes off