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Swedish sayings on distance, patience and coming home.

Three hundred years between Sweden and China

一七三一年瑞典东印度公司成立。自哥德堡启航直下广州。茶叶瓷器与丝绸往来不绝。哥德堡号一七四五年满载归航。却在望见家门的港口沉没。二零零六年仿古船重返广州。后人把那趟未竟的航程走完。一九五零年瑞典与新中国建交。是第一个这样做的西方国家。安特生一九二一年掘出仰韶彩陶。中国现代考古学自此发端。斯文赫定与中国学者同赴西北。走过戈壁楼兰与祁连山下。高本汉重构上古汉语音韵。让古人的声音再次可闻。相知无远近万里尚为邻。

  • 1731: the Swedish East India Company is founded; its ships sail from Gothenburg for Canton.
  • Tea, porcelain and silk have moved along the route ever since.
  • The Götheborg came home fully laden in 1745 and sank at the harbour mouth, within sight of home.
  • In 2006 a replica reached Guangzhou; later hands finished the voyage.
  • In 1950 Sweden established relations with the People's Republic, the first Western country to do so.
  • Johan Gunnar Andersson dug painted pottery from Yangshao in 1921; modern Chinese archaeology begins there.
  • Sven Hedin went northwest with Chinese scholars, across the Gobi, Loulan and the Qilian foothills.
  • Bernhard Karlgren reconstructed the sound of Old Chinese, making the ancients audible again.
  • “True friends feel no distance; ten thousand li and still neighbours.” (Zhang Jiuling)

Work.

Eleven years in commercial roles where the product was technical and the buyer wasn't. Three rounds of the same problem: persuading traders to let algorithms buy their media, putting the intelligence systems in place to run production infrastructure without a human holding it up, and now moving physical AI between Shenzhen and the Nordics.

Two years at Google in Dublin. Two years at AdRoll before that. Four years co-founding Ankra in Stockholm after.

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Google.

Managed Sweden's largest advertising book of business as the youngest AM in the region, averaging 18% QoQ revenue growth through consultative partnership development.

Pioneered programmatic automation at Dentsu Aegis, scaling utilisation from 3% to 68%, the highest adoption globally. The product was machine decisioning before the market called it AI: signal collection, automated bidding, models allocating budget faster than any human desk could. The hard part was never the technology, it was persuading a relationship-driven buying organisation to hand its judgement to an algorithm.

Delivered 10+ keynotes to audiences of fifty to a hundred-plus C-level stakeholders, and hosted Talks at Google including a 100+ person Q&A with the Waymo CFO.

Partnered with enterprise product leads to shape roadmap decisions based on Nordic market feedback, and contributed to 10+ EMEA hires through the regional interview committee.

Career Break.

Extended yoga practice in India and Spain, including Vipassana retreats.

Ankra.

Raised $1.2M pre-seed and secured a Techstars spot. Led every investor conversation, term negotiation, and stakeholder communication from a blank page.

Owned go-to-market for AI-augmented infrastructure: Kubernetes as the control layer for production application stacks, with AI absorbing the operations a platform team would otherwise run by hand. Category definition, positioning and pricing were mine to set, in a market with no reference point.

More on the product

In practice: Kubernetes running production application stacks, with the intelligence moving into how those environments are provisioned, maintained and recovered.

Sole commercial owner of every external relationship: investors, partners, enterprise clients.

Founded and scaled the Platform Engineering Community in Stockholm, hosting events for twenty to eighty engineers and establishing Ankra as a credible brand in the Nordic tech ecosystem.

Managed a cross-functional team of seven, balancing technical and commercial priorities in a resource-constrained environment. Self-taught Python, Infrastructure as Code, and Kubernetes to validate the MVP before capital.

NextRoll (AdRoll).

Opened the Nordics as AdRoll's first profitable EMEA market, building a book of business from zero through full-funnel outbound sales.

Trained three new hires; two became top performers within their first year.

Klingsbo Ventures AB.

The company I run, built on the commercial side of the Nordic to China corridor. It works in both directions: Chinese hardware, robotics and AI companies building into Northern Europe, and Nordic companies building the China-facing commercial motion that actually closes. Stockholm-based, working both ends.

Energize.

A toy robotics venture I'm building on the side. Details shared by invitation only.

Babu Sunuwar.

Babu is a former Red Bull athlete and the first person to fly tandem off Everest. I'm volunteering commercial strategy for his project to remove waste from above the dead zone using paragliders. If you care about this space and can help, reach out.

Paraglider, qualified P3 in Nepal. Motorcyclist: solo Stockholm to Barcelona during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three ten-day Vipassana silent meditation retreats. Reader, yoga practitioner, and quietly obsessed with where embodied intelligence goes next.

Mälardalen University.

Study abroad: XLRI Jharkhand (Top 3 Business Schools, India) and Portland State University (Professional Selling, USA).