In the ‘Seedcamp Podcast Series’ we talk with key people in the tech startup industry to hear their stories, key advice and learnings from their experiences.
This episode, Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, General Partner for leading VC Balderton Capital, joins Carlos to talk through his career working at giants such as Uber and Dropbox, and other players in the mobile landscape. The two discuss his first-hand experience of being acquired and his work in teams that very quickly scaled to include hundreds of employees. Carlos and Lars also look at the three key elements that have built global successes Dropbox, Whatsapp and Uber; the team, simplicity of product and monetization strategy.
Lars joined Balderton as a General Partner in 2015 from the car-hailing service Uber Technologies in San Francisco. There he served as Vice President Mobile forging strategic alliances with global telco companies fueling Uber’s rider and driver growth. Prior to Uber, Lars was one of the early employees at Dropbox Inc. where he kick-started the non-organic growth of the company. He co-invented and patented a new way of deeply integrating services with handset OEMs and mobile operators. In the past decade, his work has resulted in more than a billion mobile handsets shipping with integrated mobile services. Earlier companies he worked at includes Voicesignal (acquired by Nuance), Skyhook Wireless (acquired by TruePosition), Ness Technologies (acquired by Opentable), T9 Tegic (acquired by AOL).
Lars has an MBA from London Business School, MSc (mechanical engineering) from University of Oxford and a BSc from King’s college University of London. He served in the Royal Danish Guards and grew up across Africa.
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