Starting Cold

John Markus Lervik is the co-founder of Cognite, the industrial AI company Schneider Electric agreed to acquire for $3.1 billion in 2026, the largest tech exit in Norway's history. It is his second billion-dollar exit. In 2008, Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer, the search company he built out of his PhD research in Trondheim, for $1.3 billion. Along the way, Cognite became Norway's startup factory, with around 25 former employees going on to found companies of their own. We sat down with him at Cognite's headquarters in Oslo.

In this episode, John Markus explains why he considers both exits failures, and what it takes to build global companies out of Norway:

— Can ambition be learned, or are you born with it?
— What does it really cost to build at this level?
— How do you make founder-level ambition spread across an entire team?
— Why did asking Aker for 300 million kroner and a first customer change everything?
— Should Norwegian founders hire in the US, or send their own people first?

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:00 Why both exits feel like failures
00:05:07 "Forget about Norway"
00:09:05 The cost of extreme ambition
00:11:06 Spreading ambition to a team
00:17:07 The framework: vision and four balls in the air
00:21:48 Aker and the capital strategy
00:28:01 Storytelling in a technical company
00:31:59 Inside the Schneider deal
00:35:05 What's next for John Markus and Norway
00:41:33 Advice for founders going global

Suzann Pettersen is one of the most decorated golfers in history, and now the founder behind VOXA, a talent management agency built to give female athletes the tools she had to build for herself.

Tutta's mindset was forged over more than two decades competing at the top of women's golf, where she turned professional at nineteen, won fifteen LPGA Tour titles and two majors, and stayed ranked among the top two players in the world for six straight years.

In this episode, Tutta traces the full arc: from being twelve years old and laughed at for saying she'd be the best in the world, to holing the winning putt at the 2019 Solheim Cup twenty months after giving birth, to building her own company for the first time as a founder.

We dive into:— How do you train yourself to never let one bad round define you?

— What's the difference between confidence and validation, and why did chasing the wrong one nearly cost her the game?

— How do you climb back into elite competition from outside the world's top 600, with a newborn at home?

— What does it take to walk away from your sport at the very top, without a second thought?

— After twenty years of competing entirely alone, what does it take to learn how to build and lead a team?

Bjørn Mannsverk is the mental performance coach behind two of the most successful cultures in the world: The football club Bodø/Glimt, and Norway's $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund.

Bjørn's methodology is derived from his experience of +20 years as a fighter pilot in the Norwegian Air Force where he had more than 3000 hours in the cockpit of an F-16 and flew active combat missions.

In this episode, Bjørn traces the full arc: from dropping bombs over Libya, to the dressing room at Bodø/Glimt during their historic Champions League run, to one of the most demanding financial environments on the planet.

— How do you spot a high performer in the first five minutes?

— What separates self-esteem from confidence, and why does it matter when you're hiring?

— Why should you stop measuring results, and what should you measure instead?

— How do you process overwhelming pressure without letting it drive your decisions?

— What is the one thing every high performer needs to protect above everything else?

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Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro

00:01:13 Growing up at The Edge of The World

00:04:34 Train for a War You Hope Never Comes

00:11:42 The Weight of the Bomb

00:34:15 Ending up at Bodø Glimt

00:43:26 The Performance Breakthrough

Erik Bakstad is the CEO and Co-Founder of one of the biggest success stories from the Nordics that most people have never heard of.

Ardoq didn't follow a playbook, because for most of their journey, they didn't have one.

Yet somehow, Erik and his team have built one of Norway's most successful software companies from the ground up.

Today Ardoq is closing in on $100M ARR, with 300 employees across four countries and clients like ExxonMobil, British Telecom, and Carlsberg depending on their platform to navigate some of the most complex decisions in enterprise technology.

In this episode, Erik takes on the full journey: from an idea they had while working as consultants, to the basements of Startuplab, to a $125M Series D: one of the five largest private rounds in Norwegian tech history.

— What matters when fundraising from international VCs?— Can you build real US traction without leaving Norway?— When should a technical founder step into the CEO role — and when should they step aside?— What does it actually cost to move to New York when your family is in Oslo?— How do you keep your values from drifting when you've hired 200 people who never met the founding team?Chapter 1: From Hockey to Coding (1:00)Chapter 2: The Cold Call That Changed Everything (05:06)Chapter 3: Building the Company (15:02)Chapter 4: GDPR Changes The Game (27:44)Chapter 5: Building Culture Across 2 Continents (52:18)

We are on a journey to tell the stories of the greatest outliers from the New Nordics like you've never seen them before.

Starting Cold is not like other podcasts. Our studio travels to our interviews with the most successful founders, executives, athletes, and high performers and captures their journey's while physically sitting in their element.

Whether its a NYC high rise, or a boat in the Lofoten Islands, or a loft in Stockholm, Starting Cold is there to capture the playbooks of the best of the best from one of the highest performing regions in the world.