 I'm Thomas Waller. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Unicast. We are a location data company, but today, I'm not going to talk about the company. I'm more going to talk about how we have built Unicast, both in the Nordics, out of Norway, as well as in the US, in New York. And you can imagine, like, moving to New York is, of course, amazing. It's a fantastic city. It is a vibrant startup community. It has amazing talent and big, big brands and customers that you can get to. However, it looks very much like this the first year. Myself, when we moved there, we didn't have any revenue, any clients, any tech, any products. So it was very much myself, for a year, trying to figure out how to adopt to the American culture, like how to both build a company in the US as well as in the Nordics. And fast forward today, we are close to 50 people. Our commercial team is in New York, and our engineering team is in Norway. And during this talk, I'm not going to talk about the obvious learnings, like how to build an engineering team, how to do marketing, how to raise money. I'm going to talk about the non-obvious lessons that we learned, things that we weren't aware of and that we had to be in New York and to be in Oslo to really see the differences around how the culture and how to build a company. And there's one thing that we completely misjudged. Some things that, yeah, again, you have to be in New York and you have to be in Oslo to understand the nuances. And I spent countless hours trying to figure out, like, why are these cultures so different? And how can we live with such cultures? And how can we make that something that's our own? And I had to look into the history. I had to look at why are Norwegians and why Americans so different. And it very much goes back to this. It's a social democracy versus the American dream. And if you look at how the history of these two countries have been built, the US has always been about settlers. It's been about people searching for freedom, people searching for luck, people, it's all about the individual. And it's very much that today as well is individual in focus, searching for the American dream. In comparison, you have Norway, which is built about collaboration. It's built about working together. Keep in mind that Norwegians used to be farmers. So we had to work together in a very harsh country with a lot of bad weather. So the culture differences in the US versus Norway is huge. And Norway is about collaboration. And this is equally seen in how we manage our sovereign fund. But as you know, we are rich all in gas nation. We have billions of billions of dollars on the account. And as you can see, we work to safeguard and build financial wealth for future generations. So this distinct difference between the individual in focus and collaboration is something I see as a huge difference. It's something you have to take into account when you build a company in the US. And this is not about talking about that US is better or that Norway is better. I think we are extremely fortunate, because we can choose the best from both cultures and make that into something that's our own. But you have to be mindful about it. And I'm going to share three learnings, three examples of what we have seen have been things that we have to keep in mind and how we have overcome them. One thing I learned quickly when I moved to the US is decision making happens at the top. Like you have strong leaders like this guy. And the decisions were usually made by the CEO and by the management. But that doesn't work, right? When you are a startup, you have to make decisions quickly. So we have to figure out how can we do something about this and why is it like this. And one of the reasons why I believe that decision making happened very much at the top in US companies is because it's pretty much like this. Do as I say or get out. People can get fired on the next day. If they do a mistake, they can get fired. That's not the case in the Nordics. There are very strict employees' laws that protect the employee. And if you for some reason are out of a job, there's a welfare system to take care of you. The US doesn't have that at all. So it's natural that Americans are more risk averse. They don't want to make the decisions because they're afraid of potentially making mistakes. But again, in a startup, you have to make decisions all the time. You have to make them quickly. And as a CEO, I can't be the bottleneck for quick decision making. So one thing that we introduced pretty early on in the companies, then this is one of the core principles, is one of our values, be your own CEO. What this means is that we encourage everyone to make decisions rapidly. I will never be close enough to the topic to know if we should do left or right. And I also encourage everyone in the company to think about this. I rather want us to make 1,000 decisions where 100 are wrong, rather making 10 decisions where only one is wrong. The second learning I had over the last three years is very much around transparency. I think in Nordic, we are very special. It's a very radically transparent country. And I think the fact that our salaries in Norway are publicly available, that's crazy, right? This is myself. This is my co-founder. He searched myself on the website run by the government. And you can see how much I make a year and what's my net worth is. Not super impressive, but this is available for everyone out there. And this radical transparency, it just exists on the same level in the US. I think the best case is this, DMV. Like this is where you get your license. It's a very strict system. You apply, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you might get a response. So these two ways of looking how the systems are built up in terms of what information is being shared is also something that we have to adjust and adopt at Unicast. So we introduced another value, trust through transparency. What I mean is that we share everything in the company. We share everything about revenue numbers. We share everything about plans going forward. We even share notes from our management meetings. And I believe that is vital because in the early stage startup and you want to get people onto your mission, you have to tell them exactly what's going on. You can't hide. You can't tell them something else. You really need to make sure that they are equally informed as you in order to make the right decisions. And we also see how this is influencing our products. As I mentioned briefly, we are a data company. So when we sell our data, we also transpire in terms of what the clients are getting. But there's one thing that I very much like about the American culture. And this is one thing I think the Nordics can learn a lot from. And again, it goes back to the history. It goes back to the fact that the US doesn't have the same welfare system. It means that it's all about individual infocus. You have to take care of yourself. And it means that in the US there are more bolder visions. People think bigger. And people want you to succeed. But people are cheering for you wherever you are. People want you to succeed because if you're successful, you will potentially help me in the future. This is different in the Nordics. We have even something that's called the law of Jante in Norway. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with that. There are 10 rules. 10 rules that basically say, don't think you are anything better than others. And again, that doesn't work in a startup society, right? Because what you need, you're on this very hard mission to solve something. You need people that are cheering for you, people that can inspire you. And I think we have to be better in the Nordic ecosystem to do as the Americans to think bigger and to cheer each other every single day on that journey. So these are the three key learnings that we have seen. And I think every company has to find like what are the differences that they see between two cultures when they decide to build a company. We did it in Norway and the US. We decided to inform this into what we call UNA. And UNA is a constantly evolution of the key principles. And again, we're lucky we can choose the best from the US and the best from Norway and build that into something that is very our own. And to embrace this and to get this out to our people and also to the community, we have what we call a university. So this is where we train and where we teach and where we try to, again, get the best from both cultures. And we did this a lot in 2018. And we're going to do this a lot in 2019. Thank you very much.