Gustav Kinde

Area of development

• Understanding of startup business development. Which might be unnecessary to mention but it really is my main area of development and the main reason I picked Tictail as the place to do my internship during my studies at Hyper Island. I have gained extreme insight into the world of startups and I now want to stay in it. So sorry all you big and great corporations - I’m not interested, I’m going startup.
• Theory ain’t worth a dime. I have now realized theory isn’t highly valuable in startups, stuff works first when you see them do. Coming recently from academic studies it was hard to accept, but now I love it and I have managed to learn how to adapt the theoretical knowledge I have into practical knowledge.
• To get respected and to be valuable one need to take place and ownership. By saying that one should not be cocky, you should be proud and value your own time. So don’t waste your time, invest it, because investing time in boring and hard-to-understand stuff is equal to investing in yourself.
• html/CSS. Yes, now I got it. It is hard not to learn more about coding when being at a tech startup no matter your previous knowledge.

Main challenges

• Rebranding myself from intern to member of the team. When joining a company as an intern you will have the challenge of proving that you’re not only here to learn. You’re are actually given the opportunity to prove that you earn a job, and that opportunity you really should take, because you won’t get a better chance to impress a company.
• Get used to work by myself. As I have mentioned earlier it is not always easy to find your niche field and tasks. You need to create them. When not knowing your company it is hard to know your company’s needs.
• How to find my place in the company. I thought this would be easier, as I had already started to get to know the crew by joining them for drinks, dinners and parties before even starting the job. I was surprised how lonely ones work day could be like when sitting in the same room as several guys. When everybody’s wired up and deep into the computer screen it is hard to get into ones role.

It might sound like I have had a lonely time but that is not the case. I have made loads of friends and have had an amazingly good time. I am now doing my last week at Tictail next week and this whole journey has been amazing. I am now looking for my next challenge and have now accelerated my search and presence in such startup job mediums. As part of my job hunting I recently created a Pinterest CV board.

Thanks for me folks! I am now going out on the country side for the weekend, but if you would like to get in contact with me (first and foremost regarding jobs) don’t hesitate to get in contact with me in one of all the options found in the header.

Today Tictail is launching. The public beta is going to be released on the big national eCommerce conference Nordic eCommerce Summit. Until today it has been an extreme sprint and far from an regular 40 hours work week. Thanks to guys that made it possible - the creators and founders - the CEO Carl, the CTO Siavash, the designer Kaj and the tech guru Birk, which now is a synonym for hard working. We all use to hear people talking about hard workers. Those people have never met Birk. It has been long days with long hours, but it sure has been a fun trip to take. 

If you are not a developer nor a designer you might wonder what to do at a tech startup at the critical phase of developing the first version of the product? I didn’t know, and I still don’t. Because there is no answer really. Everything is your field. Roles are rarely used and if I would have a traditional role it would be called something with Growth/Sales/Marketing/Community/Content/Copyrighter etc. This was an issue for me in the beginning as I at times had to find tasks and projects by my own, and in the initial phase that is hard. I learned it and now I’m taking on projects continuously. Ask for issues and problems but don’t expect anyone to tell you what to do all the time. Do stuff yourself. The startup culture is encouraging initiative taking. The startup culture exist because of initiative taking. If you love taking initiatives and manage your own working day, go startup! 

My main learnings

• The knowledge that no one has the answer to everything. New challenge and don’t know what to do? Try your idea. Did it work? Yes, then I know how to do it. 
• The importance of acting big in order to one day become big, which is crucial when creating collaborations or even get a meeting with a company.
• How easy it is to create collaborations. When a company is in the initial phase as Tictail is, creating a collaboration is as easy as creating a friendship. As long as the both companies respect each other and can win something out of the collaboration then why not try. A good example of how easy it is to create collaborations has been shown at Tictail’s office. Besides Tictail there is two other startups that has been sharing office with us for quite a while now. Bloglovin, a service that makes it easy to read and follow blogs and Oystr. a digital advertising agency. This has had nothing but good influence on the work for all the companies, the environment at the office and the ability to start on joint projects.

After being part of a startup for three months, I now want to share my experience and write about the subject Joining a Startup, and more specifically from the non-techs perspective. This is the first post of many, describing my initial phase at a startup.
 
To get up the learning curve fast I prepared by reading loads of blog posts and articles written by startup founders, joiners and general texts about the challenge of being new at a small company. With a focus on the initial phase of a startup job, it was in particular one text affecting me the most. It was the blog post “How to make an impact during the first month of your startup job” of Eric Stromberg which was very much in line with the way I was used to work when experiencing seven months of studies at Hyper Island. Hyper Island on the other hand is very extraordinary in its way of focusing on process to the most extreme extent, both group process’s and work process’s, and before leaving the school I had forgotten how the real world was like. 

Joining the startup Tictail was how I got out in the real world, and it is also where this whole experience has taken place. Tictail is a Swedish startup, creating a tool that makes it very easy to open and run an online store. Here I have had an amazing time so far and besides that an incredible learning curve. I would not change it for anything in the world. 

With the increased impact to the everyday life of micro blogging and various news feeds we have seen significant changes in our behavior. All at the expense of traditionally fields of high status people, such as the analog, offline editorials. The position of traditional influencers has been threatened more and more since feeds and blogs became a natural news source for the modern Internet user.

Phil O’Brien, the co-founder of Climbing Fish wrote the article “Zuckerberg is killing Gutenberg!”  earlier this year in the online opinion platform Digital Ministry, discussing newspapers and books to be outdated soon and suggesting Mark Zuckerberg to be in pole position to be the 21’s Century’s greatest inventor, following his predecessor Gutenberg, named the 20th Century’s greatest inventor. However, there is a feeling of physical books, magazines and photographs that the digital is not capable of outperforming in my opinion. Kindle and other e-readers along with digital photo frames have made the gap smaller, but the feeling is not reached yet. So books and newspapers I can live without, but I won’t completely, analog photographs on the other hand, will probably be something I will live without even though I like them.

We live in an age where everything changes, improves and simplifies as we tweet and speak, and all this with a speed so incredibly fast that we have time to get used to the new technology so quickly that we do not appreciate the value it actually gives us. Take the mobile internet, for example, which is now a necessity in everyday life and a value that is only appreciated when we have lacked it for some time.

The documentary “Page One – Inside The New York Times”, by Andrew Rossi & Kate Nowack brings up the crash of the newspaper industry already about to happen, and John Lynch, founder and director at Digital Ministry responded to Phil O’Briens article that newspapers has 10 years to go. I do not believe we all have left out on traditional newspapers in 10 years as John Lynch. What I do believe is that the industry has to find the physical newspaper as a substitute to the mobile application and the online paper. The news industry has to adapt to the environment there is, where the users has higher demands on how to get a hold on information, and the user will win because the user decides the rules.

In the time of writing I was sitting in a holiday cabin in Norrtälje, north of Stockholm, Sweden on a Sunday in February. The temperature outside was -14 Celsius, and the water pipes had frozen during the night. The house was heated by a wood stove, and with the sourdough bread I enjoyed for breakfast, I drank home ground coffee made of snow that we boiled hot. I love this way of life. I am a modern, comfortable man, so obviously I would had been disturbed by an existence where I had to fight for water and heat day in and day out, but as an Spartan holiday it is great. Despite this praise for the old fashioned, tedious and slow way of life is a printed paper nothing I lack. However, mainly because I have internet access. And that I want to highlight - I have excellent internet access! How would I be able to survive out here without my podcast, feeds and apps?

Twitter, Instagr.am and Facebook brings me feeds where I get to know about everything: what my friends are doing, what my idols are doing and what has happened in the world. But the content brought to me is of varied quality. In “PressPausePlay” an documentary by House of Radon the question is raised if the democratized culture brought to us by the digital revolution leads to a landscape of greater art or if it drowns out the whole scene of art.

Being a student at the digital media school Hyper Island and about to work in the digital environment, eCommerce and online marketing it is hard to understand how my life would look like in an “offline only”- world. I have been interning for 10 weeks at Tictail, a eCommerce platform and swedish start-up, and I have really enjoyed it. I do not see myself as a proponent for whatever is digital is better, but I have to be honest to myself - I love stuff that gives me new opportunities, which a lot of digital solutions does. I have observed a significant shift in my own behavior, moving more towards headlines reading and scumming through news feeds. I have the possibility to adapt to a life without books and I have the possibility to adapt to a life without newspapers but I do not have the possibility to adapt to a life without internet, because it has changed a behavior in me forever.