Jon von Tetzchner opens up in CoFounder Podcast No 1 about founding the first Nordic unicorn, Opera Software. We talked on sidelines of Latitude59 conference about how he reached the ultimate startup dream, an IPO, on how he was forced out of the company he built, why he is so keen on the web that he founded another browser maker, Vivaldi, and what is wrong with startup funding.

Let’s start from the real beginning. You originally built Opera inside Telenor, but the company decided it was not for them and wrote reports on how it would fail. What gave you courage to not listen and launch the company anyway?

I have always thought that we are all from a small place in some ways. Why should it be that just because you’re from a big country you should succeed and if you’re from a small place you don’t. There’s been a lot of thinking in the Nordics that we can’t succeed, but I thought: Why not? Are we more stupid than these guys? I don’t think that’s the case. We are as smart as they are, so we should give it a try. Is the available software so good that we can’t make anything better? No. So let’s start a project.

I was lucky enough to be working with a truly smart coder, Geir. He taught me that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. We had a strong team from that perspective: we had a really strong coder and then me – I wasn’t too bad. We felt we were building a product that could be really good and started on a prototype to give it a try. We didn’t feel there was too much risk – we just tried it out to see what would happen. We believed we would be able to get enough usage to make it work.

Across the Nordics we’ve had a social security system there to save you.

I think in many ways it is a positive system. Some people think you should be driven by fear but I think fear stops you in some ways. Yes, we had to make sure that we could pay the rent and other bills, and we did have months without making any money, but in general we’ve felt secure in what we were doing, believing that if we failed we could either get our jobs back or find another job. We didn’t take out any loans – we just put in the minimum amount of money that is needed to start a company, which was 50,000 NOK – so our downside was reduced. We could only lose that 50,000 NOK and the time that we spent on the project.

When did risk first enter the picture? Did you need to take out a loan when you started to hire people?

Obviously we had to make enough money to make ends meet. We started hiring people in 1996 – we hired our first person in 1996 and the second in 1997. We grew at a pace where we were effectively doubling each year. From that perspective, we kept adapting to the situation and didn’t need to have external funding.

Our first loan, which was a convertible loan with little real downside, only came in 1999. We managed that situation well, converting that loan in our next round in 2000.

Of course, we had close calls along the way. We almost had investors in 1996, 1997 and 1998, and we were almost sold during that period too. I think part of our success was that it didn’t happen.

How did you protect the company in the early phase?

We just built the company. I think we were very close to making significant mistakes along the way, because we didn’t know what we were doing. In 1996 we signed an intention agreement to have an investor come in. They gave a very good talk: told us how they were long term investors and would support us all the way, pointed out all their investments where that had happened. We signed the deal in the afternoon and the next morning I got a call; the investor had asked one of their other companies that made modems to bundle our software. That company said no, so the investor told us we should kill the browser and become a consulting company on the web. Luckily,